


Love Languages

by tarysande



Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Challenge Response, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-14
Updated: 2019-02-14
Packaged: 2019-10-28 11:09:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,197
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17786258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tarysande/pseuds/tarysande
Summary: It’s all the steps forward and all, all, all the steps back. It’s oneupmanship and secrets and all the times she’s seen his eyes full of something he never says aloud.





	Love Languages

**Author's Note:**

  * For [randomkiwibirds](https://archiveofourown.org/users/randomkiwibirds/gifts).



 

_Words_

Lucifer looks beautiful in blue. More beautiful. But the furrow in his brow and the slight downward curve of his mouth distress her. Chloe imagines that when he speaks, it will be to leave—her, their partnership, maybe Los Angeles.

With his coat slung over a shoulder, he looks sad instead of nonchalant; a little defeated. He looks like someone with one foot reluctantly out the door, gazing back into the warmth. Wanting a reason to stay he’s already certain no one will give.

She swallows past a lump in her throat.

Chloe Decker realizes she’s in love with Lucifer Morningstar while they’re standing on a beach under a cloudy sky. He’s wearing blue. He says, “I’d be honored to simply continue working by your side. If you’ll have me.”

He says, “You deserve someone worthy of you, and that isn’t me.”

He says, “More importantly, Detective, you deserve someone as good as you. Because, well, you’re special. And I’m … I’m not worth it.”

And she doesn’t know if it’s because of how loudly his words say _I see you, I see you, I see you_ or because this is the first time she truly sees _him_ —the way he deflects and denigrates himself and waits for the proverbial axe to fall because of course it always does—behind the persona he wears with the same natural ease he wears his three-piece suit, but she kisses him.

_I see you, I see you, I see you,_ her kisses say, while beneath the palm of her hand, he trembles.

 

_Time_

She invites Lucifer to dinner, casually, as if it means nothing. All the while, her stomach does funny little flips and twists and arabesques that almost distract from the hard little knot that’s been buried beneath her ribs since Lucifer said the words _just friends_. Her fingers keep reaching for the necklace she’s worn at her throat since he gave it to her a few weeks ago. If he’s surprised when he shows up and it’s just her and Trixie, he doesn’t show it. He still makes a face when Trix throws her arms around his legs; he still rolls his eyes and quips. Some things never change.

His eyes linger on the necklace. He’s beautiful when the color rises in his cheeks. He’s beautiful, she thinks, when he’s caught off-guard by something _good_ for a change.

He brings wine—great wine—and they drink it. He doesn’t comment on her slightly underdone potatoes or slightly overdone steaks, though he goes into completely overwrought raptures about the sundae bar—Trixie’s idea—for dessert. He doesn’t even complain about stickiness. He and Trixie load their bowls with every possible topping in quantities Chloe can only cringe at. She adds a few sprinkles to her bowl of vanilla and plunks a cherry on top as a concession to the sundae of it.

If he’s brought his phone, he doesn’t check it. She doesn’t hear it ring or buzz or vibrate. If he has other places to be or other people to be with, he shows no inclination for going.

He takes off his jacket. After dinner and sundaes and the box of chocolate-covered strawberries he produces—“What, Detective, surely you don’t object? It’s fruit!” “Yeah, Mommy, it’s healthy!”—he removes his shoes.

Chloe’s not sure he’s ever done that before. Not in her house. She’s seen him naked on more than one completely inappropriate occasion; she’s seen him in his silk robe in his penthouse, looking tempting in a way she’d never admit on pain of death. She’s never seen him in socked feet in her living room, starting a fire in her fireplace, while Trixie hunts down Monopoly in the game closet.

It’s … it’s so strange. Flips and twists and arabesques strange.

This living room has never known this kind of intimacy.

“Look what I found!” Trixie crows, returning to the room not with Monopoly but with a pan of face paints. “Mommy, can you make me a crown? Lucifer, can I paint your face?”

Chloe expects Lucifer to flee, but he only turns away from the now-crackling fire, smiles, says, “Not in a hundred thousand bloody years, urchin.”

He doesn’t need face paint; the firelight gilds his features. He’s beautiful then, too.

“Sure, Monkey,” she says. “I think I’ll have flowers.”

Lucifer stays and stays and stays. And, lying on the floor next to him, her lips sticky with sugar, their shoulders occasionally bumping as her clever daughter fleeces them both, Chloe wants, wants, wants.

 

_Gifts_

It’s never been about presents for Chloe. Flowers are flowers and chocolates are chocolates, and as her relationship with Dan slowly died, she received so many of both any fondness she ever had for either died, too.

Lucifer brings her perfect cups of coffee from her favorite coffee place, which somehow always stay warm no matter how far away the crime scene is or how bad the traffic on the way to the station. If he meets her at a crime scene—he knows that every crime scene breaks her heart—he brings a lemon square. When the precinct’s coffee maker finally gurgles to an ignominious death, it’s replaced in an hour with a top of the line model she doesn’t even see him order. He makes her burgers and fries; he pays for dinners; he chastises her if she misses meals. He buys her daughter—her sticky spawn whose hugs he endures with such distaste—ridiculously overpriced toys.

For someone who basks in the limelight and craves attention to an almost pathological degree, he never brings attention to these little things, these perfect things. Not when it’s something he does or buys for her. She’s lost count of how many problems he’s solved with money or favors. She’s lost count of how many times she’s parted her lips to say thank you, only to receive a look that seems horrified she’d even noticed.

Pierce gives her flowers. He gives her chocolates. He makes meals and lemon squares and watches her intently as she eats them, an off-putting kind of calculation in his eyes. She overhears him talking to Ella about her, and Ella, with all the exuberance of her cheerful personality, scattering information like rose petals. He tries and tries and tries, slowly wearing down her resistance like water wearing away the rough surface of a stone.

Lucifer gives her a corsage. He gives her a prom. He gives her a dance with his hand on her back and his eyes full of something she wishes he would speak out loud, could speak out loud, that would change everything if he could just say it out loud.

He’s beautiful in the dim lights of this universe he’s created just for her.

And Chloe wants and wants and wants what, in that hard little knot beneath her ribs, she knows she cannot ever have.

Pierce gives her a gold chain with a heart pendant on it to replace the necklace he doesn’t want her to wear; she wears neither. He gives her an engagement ring in a box and it’s nicer than the one Dan could afford, all those years ago. She tells herself it’s beautiful, she’s lucky; she ignores how generic it is, and how completely not her style.

 

_Service_

Lucifer is acting weird (weirder). Manic (more manic). Greatest hits, he calls them.

_Might-have-beens,_ she thinks, _if onlys_ , as the hard little knot under her ribs expands and expands and expands. She’s reminded of Trixie’s birth, of lying flat on her back with her feet in the stirrups pleading desperately with anyone who would listen to make it stop, make it stop, make it stop. “The only way out is through, sweetheart,” said one of the nurses; Chloe never knew which one. “The only way out is through.”

The seed that’s been buried under Chloe’s ribs won’t stop growing. She’s just not sure what it will look like when it’s done. Lucifer plays the piano. Lucifer plays Monopoly. Lucifer gives her a dance and his eyes are full of something she knows too well and has seen too much—desperation.

In her belly and her chest and her throat, words flip and trip and stumble through arabesques.

“I don’t understand why you’re doing this,” she says. And it’s not just dancing or piano or boardgames. It’s walking into an apartment shrouded in sheets and ghosts. It’s a candy-haired wife. It’s the way he said, “Friends? Yes. Friends, that’s exactly what we are. Just friends,” and planted heartbreak like a hard little knot of a seed beneath her ribs _._

It’s all the steps forward and all, all, all the steps back. It’s oneupmanship and secrets and all the times she’s seen his eyes full of something he never says aloud.

She says, “Right now, normal, it just hurts.”

The feeling of the expanding seed, the growing tendrils, keeps creeping up her spine and catching her unawares, usually when she least expects it. It’s there when she says she’ll marry Pierce. It’s there when, after her disastrous bachelorette party, heartbroken for reasons that have very little to do with calling off a wedding, she says she won’t.

It’s there when she stays up all night playing greatest-hits might-have-beens, drinking coffee after coffee after coffee. It’s certainly there when she stands in Ella’s lab the next day and speaks the words she’s been carrying around in a hard little knot under her ribs for more than a year.

“I think if I’m honest with myself, all of this is about Lucifer.”

It hurts and hurts and hurts to want what she knows she cannot ever have.

Chloe plays the piano. Twelve little notes. _Heart and soul, I fell in love with you._ Lucifer’s eyes are full again, full of the things he never says.

This time, he speaks.

He speaks, and he is beautiful, and maybe now the seed she’s been carrying around can grow into something beautiful, too.

He kisses her.

Her phone rings.

And this time, the heartbreak has nothing to do with him.

After, Lucifer opens his arms and she walks into them. He cups the back of her head. _Because you held me tight._ He calls Trixie’s sitter. When she’s cold with shock and midnight, he offers his coat. Coffee arrives at the crime scene, along with food that no one touches.

When she needs a moment—she needs several over the course of the long night—he is a wall between her and the world, immovable, impenetrable. A guardian angel, if anything; not the Devil. Not to her.

 

_Touch_

It isn’t that Lucifer avoids being touched; not with the number of sexual partners he’s had. But he chooses who he touches and who touches him. He’s really very good at it; no one notices how deliberate he is.

It’s different with Chloe. From the moment she reaches toward the ragged edges of the scars on his shoulder blades, she’s _different_.

She sees them, for one thing. So few people do.

She sees them, and she looks at him not with curiosity but concern. Genuine concern.

In all his years, his impossible years, his years before years were counted or even invented, no one has ever reached for him outside of lust or anger. The few familial touches he remembers belong to someone else; Samael, perhaps. Not Lucifer.

No one touches Lucifer Morningstar without wanting something in exchange. No one touches him to comfort, to cajole, to curb. But Chloe touches his arm, his stomach, his wrist, his face, and asks for nothing in return. Her touches say, _I’m here,_ as if every one of them is commonplace and not a kind of personal miracle on a par with creating stars.

He begins to take her touches for granted. Looks for them, even. Waits for them. He returns them, first hesitantly, and then with increasing ease—a hand on her back, a nudge of the shoulder, his fingertips ghosting across her forearm. _I’m here_ , he says. Sometimes she smiles like a sunrise, a supernova, the birth of a universe.

But when she stands across a bloody, feather-strewn room, alive and beautiful and wide-eyed, the distance between them has never seemed greater. She sees the monster before Lucifer can hide him. She sees red eyes and red flesh, the herald of endings. This one, he thinks, will be worst of all.

“It’s all true,” she says. “It’s all true.”

Monster. Endings.

He turns to go, wanting a reason to stay he’s already certain she’ll never give. He takes one step, two, twelve, and then her hand is on his arm, his wrist; she’s grabbing his hand even though she’s seen it red and burned and broken, and the monster can never be unseen.

“Not to me,” she says, with her eyes full of something he’s too afraid to name. Beginnings. “Not to me.”

She presses her hand to his heart. She presses her heart to his heart.

She kisses him.

_I see you, I see you, I see you,_ her kisses tell him. And beneath the palm of her hand, he trembles.

Beneath the palm of her hand, he hopes.

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for The Deckerstar Network's True Partner's challenge. The elements I had to include were: red, dinner, Ella's lab, and you're special (2x12). My partner, the lovely @randomkiwibirds, made a beautiful edit to go with/meet the same prompt.


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